Saturday, August 27, 2016

The atheist movement and battle fatigue

The atheistic Soviet Union with all its modern military technology was defeated by the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

According to the New York Times, "The Soviet Army has performed poorly during its eight-and-a-half-year war in Afghanistan, largely because of low morale, according to a study of its combat effectiveness completed for the United States Army." Morale matters! And atheism is not a very motivating ideology (see: Atheism and apathy).

If only the godless Soviets had the high morale of the soldiers of Christ! The prominent historian Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, said, "Christianity, the world's largest religion, is rapidly expanding – by all indications, its future is very bright." (see: High morale of Christendom ).

Colonel Dave Grossman and Bruce K. Siddle wrote in their work the "Psychological Effects of Combat" which was published in the Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict

During World War II, 504,000 men were lost from America's combat forces due to psychiatric collapse--enough to man 50 divisions. The United States suffered this loss despite efforts to weed out those mentally and emotionally unfit for combat by classifying more than 800,000 men 4-F (unfit for military service) due to psychiatric reasons. At one point in World War II, psychiatric casualties were being discharged from the U.S. Army faster than new recruits were being drafted in.

Swank and Marchand's World War II study of US Army combatants on the beaches of Normandy found that after 60 days of continuous combat, 98% of the surviving soldiers had become psychiatric casualties. And the remaining 2% were identified as "aggressive psychopathic personalities." Thus it is not too far from the mark to observe that there is something about continuous, inescapable combat which will drive 98% of all men insane, and the other 2% were crazy when they got there...

It must be understood that the kind of continuous, protracted combat that produces such high psychiatric casualty rates is largely a product of 20th-century warfare. The Battle of Waterloo lasted only a day. Gettysburg lasted only three days--and they took the nights off. It was only in World War I that armies began to experience months of 24-hour combat, and it is in World War I that vast numbers of psychiatric casualties were first observed.

97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious. In the coming decades, religious immigrants will be pouring into secular Europe to replace an aging workforce due to irreligious Europeans not having a replacement level of fertility. Europe will become post secular. China, which has the largest atheist population, is seeing an explosive growth of evangelical Christianity. Evangelical Christianity is expected to grow as a percentage of the world's population in the 21st century.

In terms of the global picture, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year, the atheist movement will be losing ground in the 21st century due to demographic changes and other factors (see: Causes of desecularization ). This will invariably affect educational systems, the media and a wide range of government policies. Religious people vote in elections and consumers vote in terms of their purchases. For example, news organizations will not want to lose religious customers by offending them as the religious become more dominant in a culture. And today's news organization are operating 24 hours a day. In short, militant atheists in the 21st century will face continuous, protracted culture war which they will be losing to an ever increasing degree.

Eric Kaufmann, an agnostic professor whose academic research specialty is how demographic changes affect religion/irreligion and politics, wrote in 2010:

Worldwide, the march of religion can probably only be reversed by a renewed, self-aware secularism. Today, it appears exhausted and lacking in confidence... Secularism's greatest triumphs owe less to science than to popular social movements like nationalism, socialism and 1960s anarchist-liberalism. Ironically, secularism's demographic deficit means that it will probably only succeed in the twenty-first century if it can create a secular form of 'religious' enthusiasm

Grossman and Bruce K.Siddle further wrote in their work the "Psychological Effects of Combat:

The soldier in combat endures many indignities...

The ultimate fear and horror in most modern lives is to be raped, tortured, or beaten, to be physically degraded in front of loved ones or to have the sanctity of the home invaded by aggressive and hateful intruders.

Death or debilitation is statistically far more likely to occur by disease or accident than by malicious action, but statistics have nothing to do with fear.

In Sweden, Germany and elsewhere in Europe , the irreligious have seen Muslim immigrants target irreligious women in terms of sexual assault (see: Atheism vs. Islam). The YouTube atheist Pat Condell is very angry about the European Muslim rape problem. Yet, the irreligious have a poor track record when it comes to rape and domestic violence (see: Atheism and rape and Irreligion and domestic violence).

In a public lecture held in Australia, an irreligious woman asked the academic and agnostic Eric Kaufmann how he thought fundamentalist influence would affect public policy as far as the teaching of evolutionism in public schools. You could tell she was very fearful when she asked this question as she was afraid of Kaufmann's answer. Needless to say, Kaufmann provided her no reassurance that Darwinism would continue to be taught in public schools (see: Eric Kaufmann: Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, Australian Broadcasting Corporation ).

Mass migration has led to a rise in creationist beliefs across Europe, according to a British scientist.

Michael Reiss, who is a professor of education at the Institute of Education in London and an Anglican priest, said the evolution-creationism debate could no longer be thought of as something that happened elsewhere and that more and more people in the UK did not accept evolution.

Reiss told the Guardian that countries with a higher proportion of Muslims or fundamentalist Christians in their population were more likely to reject evolution. He added: "What the Turks believe today is what the Germans and British believe tomorrow. It is because of the mass movement of people between countries.

"These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries. In London, where I work, there are increasingly quite large numbers of highly intelligent 16, 17 and 18-year-olds doing Advanced Level biology who do not accept evolution. That's either because they come from a fundamentalist Christian background or from Muslim backgrounds."

The British newspaper The Telegraphdeclared in an article entitled Richard Dawkins: Muslim parents 'import creationism' into schools:

Prof Dawkins, a well-known atheist, also blamed the Government for accommodating religious views and allowing creationism to be taught in schools.

"Most devout Muslims are creationists so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught," Prof Dawkins said in a Sunday newspaper interview.

"Teachers are bending over backwards to respect home prejudices that children have been brought up with. The Government could do more, but it doesn't want to because it is fanatical about multiculturalism and the need to respect the different traditions from which these children come."

Now as the irreligious attain critical mass in terms of a voting block, it is inevitable that secular sacred cows in terms of pseudoscience (for example, Darwinism) and secular leftist ideologies will be rejected by the public and no longer promoted in public schools. Kaufmann believes that the conservative/fundamentalists of the Abrahamic religions will form alliances regarding matters they agree on.

Is a culture war as intense as a modern battle field? No. At the same time, militant atheists and atheist activists are a proud lot (see:Atheism and arrogance ). They are exactly the type of people who are most vulnerable to continuous and protracted conflict where they suffer defeats. For example, after 5 years of conflict with feminists where the feminists were largely winning, the New Atheist Richard Dawkins appears to have buckled under the pressure.

It was the result of stress-related higher blood pressure, which he says he may have had as a result of recent controversy, including being booted from the NECSS conference. He added, however, that on February 5, he received a letter from conference organizers apologizing for disinviting him and asking him back to the conference.

Post Elevatorgate controversy, Dawkins saw a large loss of public influence (see: Richard Dawkins' loss of influence ). In 2013, Martin Robbins wrote in the New Statesman concerning the public persona of Dawkins: "Increasingly though, his public output resembles that of a man desperately grasping for attention and relevance..."

In an article also published in this issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Mayo Clinic researchers reviewed published studies, meta-analyses, systematic reviews and subject reviews that examined the association between religious involvement and spirituality and physical health, mental health, health-related quality of life and other health outcomes. The authors report a majority of the nearly 350 studies of physical health and 850 studies of mental health that have used religious and spiritual variables have found that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes.

The data from social sciences - namely demography, history, medical science, sociology and psychology - point to the atheist movement suffering losses in the 21st century and many atheists being very demoralized by these losses. Atheists may desperately grasps for attention for a time, but as time goes on, resignation will set in. I can already see resignation/pessimism setting in post decline of the New Atheism.

And there are signs that the intellectual assault on atheism is increasing.

There’s been a forceful backlash against the ‘new atheism’ of writers like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, inspiring a new wave of Christian apologists. This group includes: Alister McGrath, Professor of Theology at King’s College London, Keith Ward, former Professor of Divinity at Oxford, and John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Many atheists make the mistake of assuming religion is wholly irrational, relying on faith alone but, in a series of interviews recorded for DVD, the apologetics heavyweights from the list above demonstrate their ability to challenge us with reasoned arguments

American evangelical Christians have began to notice in the fifties that compromise is a slow poison that ultimately destroys respect for truth. Some of them came together and started writing aggressively on themes defending the historical and scientific reliability of the Bible. This gave birth to the modern interest in Apologetics and Creationism. At the dawn of the twenty-first century the influence of this revival has spread all over the world, and today more than one hundred and fifty organizations function around the world, devoted solely to apologetics. Their influence has be so strong that a large number of Seminaries all around the world have begun assert the historical and scientific reliability of the Bible...

...with the birth of the modern creationism and apologetics, a revival set in motion among the evangelical Christians. This group became quite vocal and aggressive in the sixties, and by seventies they started exerting significant influence among theologians, thinkers, and the Bible teachers all over the world.
Thousands of apologetic books, hundreds of magazines, and tens of thousands of articles have been produced defending the Bible since. In turn, this has started to diminish the influence of rationalists and radicals on Christians.

From the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century the rationalists had their heyday, snatching away millions of young people from their Christian faith and commitment. The wounds of this loss can been seen in Christendom even today, but at the same time this loss has been greatly minimized now because of the work of Christian apologists.

Today anyone desiring to know about the Bible, and its connection with science, evolution, history, archaeology, has read any number of books on this topic. Literally thousands of titles are available, and he can choose anywhere from the most simple books to the most technically advanced ones. Thus the modern apologetics movement has been able to arrest the way in which rationalists have been bleeding the Christian church

Now most so-called atheists are merely atheist posers who claim that atheism is merely a "lack of belief" in God/gods. How is that different from agnosticism? See: Definition of atheism

Studs Terkel,
a self-described agnostic, jokingly referred to the frequent charge of
agnostics being called cowardly, "You happen to be talking to an
agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist".

Atheism is dying in terms of its global market share. Atheist activists are increasing becoming demoralized. And atheists are now faced with a creeping barrage of excellent material defending the reasonableness of Christianity and the unreasonableness of atheism. Should Jesus tarry, in the latter half of the 21st century or possibly earlier, everywhere atheists look they will see a creeping barrage of BAD news (see: Desecularization).

Below is a video of a creeping barrage of artillery fire. As you will soon see, a creeping artillery barrage can be a very demoralizing thing. In addition, there is a video on the effects of artillery on the combat effectiveness of the opposing forces. The last video is a reminder of what happens when men oppose God - they lose!